Jack London Quotes

Jack London delivers gritty, practical thoughts on imagination and work, great for those looking for a no-nonsense boost.

39 quotes

1. The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances.

2. I am. I was. I am not. I never am.

3. There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants.... The other type of drinker has imagination, vision. Even when most pleasantly jingled he walks straight and naturally, never staggers nor falls, and knows just where he is and what he is doing. It is not his body but his brain that is drunken.

4. I was five years old the first time I got drunk.

5. Men do not knowingly drink for the effect alcohol produces on the body. What they drink for is the brain-effect; and if it must come through the body, so much the worse for the body.

6. The fortunate man is the one who cannot take more than a couple of drinks without becoming intoxicated. The unfortunate wight is the one who can take many glasses without betraying a sign; who must take numerous glasses in order to get the kick.

7. Life's not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes playing a poor hand well.

8. I did not begin when I was born, nor when I was conceived. I have been growing, developing, through incalculable myriads of millenniums. All my previous selves have their voices, echoes, promptings in me. Oh, incalculable times again shall I be born.

9. A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.

10. I have always stood for the exalting of the life that is in me over art, or any other extraneous thing.

11. The man who dreams of artistry, and yet thinks it is necessary for someone else to lick him into shape, is a man whose art is doomed to mediocrity. If you're going to deliver the real goods, you've got to do your own licking into shape. Buck up ! Kick in ! Get onto yourself ! Don't squeal ! Don't tell me, or any other man how good you consider anything you've done, and that you think it is as good as somebody else's. Make your work so damned well better that you won't have time or thought to compare it with another man's mediocrity.

12. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

13. You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

14. As one grows weaker one is less susceptible to suffering. There is less hurt because there is less to hurt.

15. Having no new companions, nothing remained for him but to read.

16. A man with a club is a law-maker.

17. The Stone the Builders Rejected.

18. Then one can't make a living out of poetry? Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes.

19. There are things greater than our wisdom, beyond our justice. The right and wrong of this we cannot say, and it is not for us to judge.

20. San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories.

21. It is a simple matter to see the obvious, to do the expected. The tendency of the individual life is to be static rather than dynamic, and this tendency is made into a propulsion by civilization, where the obvious only is seen, and the unexpected rarely happens. When the unexpected does happen, however, and when it is of sufficiently grave import, the unfit perish. They do not see what is not obvious, are unable to do the unexpected, are incapable of adjusting their well-grooved lives to other and strange grooves. In short, when they come to the end of their own groove, they die.

22. Affluence means influence.

23. He was not immoral, but merely unmoral.

24. The marriage tie becomes possessed of a history and takes to itself traditions. This history and these traditions form a great fund, to which changing conditions and growing imagination constantly add. And the traditions, more especially, bear heavily upon the individual, overmastering his natural expression of the love instinct and forcing him to an artificial expression of that love instinct. He loves, not as his savage forbears loved, but as his group loves.

25. The hand descended. Nearer and nearer it came. It touched the ends of his upstanding hair. He shrank down under it. It followed down after him, pressing more closely against him. Shrinking, almost shivering. He still managed to hold himself together. It was a torment, this hand that touched him and violated his instinct. He could not forget in a day all the evil that had been wrought him at the hands of men.

26. Alcohol tells truth, but its truth is not normal.

27. Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of Time.

28. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild. (Ch.1)

29. To be able to forget means sanity.

30. Strength is an empty shell.

31. My life shall be free and broad and great, and I will not be the slave to the sense delights which chained my ancient ancestry. I reject the heritage. I break the entail. And who are you to say I am unwise?

32. Of her own experience she had no memory of the thing happening; but in her instinct, which was the experience of all mothers of wolves, there lurked a memory of fathers that had eaten their new-born and helpless progeny.

33. Socialism, when the last word is said, is merely a new economic and political system whereby more men can get food to eat.

34. A good soldier is a blind, heartless, soulless, murderous machine. He is not a man. His is not a brute, for brutes kill only in self defense. All that is human in him, all that is divine in him, all that constitutes the man has been sworn away when he took the enlistment roll. His mind, his conscience, aye, his very soul, are in the keeping of his officer. No man can fall lower than a soldier-it is a depth beneath which we cannot go.

35. I would rather be ashes than dust.

36. I'd rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it, than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet.

37. If a company is distributing images and video then obviously they need bandwidth solutions. But if they are looking to the mass market then they must develop WAP sites.

38. The Wild still lingered in him and the wolf in him merely slept.

39. Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.